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I shared this before.
If you were a person of color, having Uber and Airbnb were a game changer. Taxis and hotels were awful from the 80s-2010s.
Taxis were racists and often wouldn’t even pick you up. If they did, they often took you on a joyride. Hotels were absolute shit holes. Want to complain about your room? Go pound sand.
Those industries werent good for decades. And the disruption actually made car sharing much more consistent and hotel experiences better.
Interesting perspective I never accounted before thank you. Cabs were notorious for not picking up black people. Can’t speak for hotels.
I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a taxi without them trying to pull one over me in some way.
Taxis sucked for white people too.
I’m not sure you understand the parent comment. I didn’t realize how terrible until I hailed a cab, noticed someone who was actually also hailing but must have been doing so before me, so I deferred and offered the cab I hailed to him. The cabby noticed the person was black and just booked it. The person was resigned and indicated this was not uncommon.
I was sitting outside the courthouse with this cool old black guy smoking weed and buying it from him. This guy is a real badass and challenges my perceptions. When he waves me over to sit between him and this other black guy, the other black guy acted like I must have the plague or something and he wouldn’t talk with me or even look at me. He took the first moment he could to go sit back by Bob. The guy had fear in his eyes, plain enough for someone autistic to see. He was afraid of me, and almost certainly for my race. Feels bad man. Not because I super wanted to interact with him or anything, but because he’s clearly been through some awful shit.
Now imagine the old cabbies who wouldn’t pick up a black guy. Why is that? They don’t tip well for not having much money? Maybe there was even worse experiences. I’m just trying to say that there shouldn’t be any pressure for individuals to rub up against something that repels them like that.
The problem here is clearly that some industries have been dominated by particular races who tend to alienate each other and live in echo chambers. An industry should not be occupied by a race because that causes these kinda of rifts and lack of availability. I don’t think it’s fair to just be like “well that cabbie discriminated and let’s prosecute that.” We need to change the gears and lube them up!
The amount of times their credit card machine would just “break” so that you’d be forced to pay in cash and tip much more back then was staggering.
Reeeeee! USSA, please fix bullshit tips. My country is just 4 km away from you and it’s really concerning.
OR we can keep one fairly easily attainable, ubiquitous job that pays decently.
I’d rather make sure everyone gets healthcare than take away their tips.
If you get them healthcare and $30/hr (by the time we accomplish it), then yeah, take their tips.
Uber
Airbnb
Bitcoin
OpenAI
did I guess right
I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.
There are also at least three ubers where I’m at. It’s more about a business model.
fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.
My brother in Christ, all money is fake. Even gold coins are ‘fake’ money, because all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
That’s the definition of money. It’s not fake. It is an abstraction, but it’s not fake, and we’ve built an intricate system of laws and regulations about it.
Bitcoin is fake money. It’s not backed by any government or any real rules and regulations. It’s the same as every other “tech” company. Take an existing thing, remove all regulations, pretend it’s a new thing, and pocket the increased revenue.
Money existed before there was an intricate system of laws and regulations. Money existed before there were fiat currencies, backed by nothing except a gov’t’s promises. The fact that bitcoin doesn’t have those doesn’t make it any more real, or less real, than any other thing used as currency. It has value because people believe that it has value.
Gold is much the same way. Gold has an intrinsic value for making things that conduct electricity (particularly because it doesn’t corrode), but all other values exist because it’s both relatively rare, and people have decided that it’s pretty.
Money arose at the same time as government. The two are linked.
that’s not true.
government backing only defines money under Adam smiths theory, but we had money and governmentless money long before smith.
And there was a different government backing it (though not in the same sense of the word) and a different set of laws and regulations around it.
you’ve swallowed the adam smith koolaid. anarchist societies existed with money.
That’s a cute fairy tale.
if you want to deny history, i’m not going to stop you, but you should be ashamed of misleading anyone else who reads this.
I’m ashamed that anyone is dumb enough to be taken in by your obvious lies.
All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.
Uber is also scum tho. Seems there’s always going to be something dodgy about getting into cars with random strangers.
Uber, even today has a FAR higher success rate with my personally. Even two weeks ago I had a driver telling me his card reader wasn’t working until it magically did when I started threatening to simply not pay and walk away. This has happened to me multiple times even with my reduced cab rate.
The worst I’ve ever dealt with in Uber is waiting and cancelled pickup despite using it far more often.
what’s the fake money for criminals
Cryptocurrency
that’s not fake money, and it isn’t “for” criminals. it’s real, and that’s why criminals use it.
If you’re “invested” in cryptogoboligook and you’re not ripping someone off–guess what?–you’re the mark.
Regardless, you can generally use money to buy things.
You can’t buy anything with crypto because it’s 15 years later, and “mass adoption” is never happening. It’s “fake money”.
since people treat crypto as money, it is money.
Crypto is an un-backed and unregulated security – the value of which fluctuates wildly. Turns out most people don’t like being paid in something that can drastically lose value in the span of hours.
The few people and institutions that accept crypto as payment either immediately convert it back into real money or are “investors” treating it like the security it actually is.
most money throughout history has been “unbacked” and unregulated
They only “use it” to transfer the funds. Once they have it, they cash it in. No criminal is keeping it in crypto form. They use it the same way they use Apple gift cards.
tally sticks were debt tokens. people used them as money out of convenience, and would exchange them for cash if it was possible.
An easy way to tell if it’s “real” money or not is to see if goods are ever priced directly in it, where it isn’t just directly indexed to the exchange rate of an established currency.
Hint: Even places that accept crypto payments don’t do this. The crypto price fluctuates based on the moment by moment exchange rate to the local currency.
sumerians denoted everything in silver shekels but trade was done will all manner of commodities, including barley grains. your theory of money sounds like it comes from the Adam Smith cult.
Are barley grains a currency? I’m not understanding your argument here. In a practical sense, cryptocurrencies are far too volatile to use as a currency and the “stable” coins are tied to things like the US dollar. Well, I should say allegedly tied because “stable” coins like tether haven’t been audited to actually prove it’s tied to the underlying.
tally sticks denoted debt in Britain, and were used directly as money out of convenience, but they were themselves denoted in roman currency iirc.
Can I ask what the point of arguing semantics here is?
Maybe you have put in the effort to figure out all the avenues to use bitcoin to pay for things, but its not easy and you sound more like a drug addict scrounging for metal and bottles, and then wondering why noone else is interested in your hustle.
Why do you care if people call bitcoin real or not anyways? For most people its not real, for you I guess it is, does that make sense?
So latin American currencies are not real money. We already knew but wow harsh reality
With real money you can take out a loan. Kinda the whole point of money, it represents value that is owed.
While crypto loans would be technically possible it would be a foolish thing to do since it’s effectively a short on something that could increase in value. Real money has a small but steady (well, ideally) inflation so you can be confident in taking out a loan and not having to worry about the currency doing something crazy like doubling in value resulting in you owing double the value than you initially borrowed. This is not the case for crypto so it’s simply not a viable currency for financing anything.
Since it’s not viable for financing, it’s not a real currency and never will be. Like is someone supposed to take out a business loan in real currency, convert it to crypto, pay someone else who would then have to convert it back to real money so they can pay back their loan? Why would people want to do all of these conversions back and forth to and from crypto? Because they like the risk of the value dropping for the brief time they’re holding onto it?
your standards aren’t based on historical fact.
Go throw crypto at a stripper then!
they probably don’t accept tally sticks or turquoise as payment either. were those fake money too?
Yes.
great. live in your bigotry.
The fuck are you talking about?
Regardless of your personal opinions about cryptocurrency, that is absolutely what this post is referring to by saying fake money for criminal.
they’re not opinions, but I’m sure you’re right about the post.
I can only imagine he means American currency, and the anti-counterfeiting technology embedded in it. It’s the most popular currency in the world.
Oh, bitcoin? The accounting package that requires the power of a small nation to maintain it? Well, I guess that works, too.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require all that power. nothing about the code dictates that. it’s a social phenomenon, just like the markets.
The bitcoin blockchain requires more power than any other blockchain while providing less features.
The only outstanding feature of bitcoin is it’s price.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power. any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
The bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power.
Yes. It does. No transaction can occur without proof of work being performed.
any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
Marginally less power, but nowhere near the reduction needed to compete with a PoS blockchain.
For example Ethereum PoS uses 2,600 MWh per year (= a single 1MW windfarm). Bitcoin uses 53,000x more energy than Ethereum.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis. there is no minimum power requirement in the protocol.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis.
No. Then someone would buy 3 raspberry pis and claim all the bitcoin.
Bitcoin was a great idea in 2008 but in 2024 it has been overshadowed by other blockchains in every single dimension except for market cap.
Fake money for criminals only because it was useful for me when I wanted to buy drugs while living in a place with little access to them
It’s especially funny since criminal enterprises have used “legal” currency since its invention. It’s almost like criminals are gonna criminal, regardless of the “tender”. 🤌🏽
For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.🤌🏿
The weed and lsd were to this day the best I have had too. I don’t love crypto currencies for many many reasons but it has been years and I still think about those trips
Cryptocurrency with Tor has unironically done more for drug safety than most administrations worldwide. I hate the framing “fake money for criminals” because while there are despicable crimes, not all of them use cryptocurrency, in fact USD was the most common last time I checked, OTOH what constitutes a criminal can be an arbitrary rule. Woman in Texas having an abortion paying with crypto? Fits the definition but I’m not sure people here would condemn it.
I’m not happy with how cryptocurrency turned out with the huge speculational bubble, NFTs, not even a huge fan of smart contracts but I think the idea of a decentralized and maybe even anonymous ledger is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
Crypto massively helped me when the banks wanted 45 bucks for an international transfer for my buddy to send me money for something I made him. Fuck banks
I’d say fake money.
For uber, we’ve never had the overpriced cabs that it was made to circumvent in the first place. It was more of a wild west with lots of smaller companies with in-house made sites. We’ve even had an app that checked their prices, ordered the cheapest ones and cancelled others once a car is found. Then a major player entered the market, and they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, giving estimates but driving by the meter, which ended up consistently much higher in the end. Then uber came, and started undercutting everyone with stupidly low prices, but their app/maps are an unbearable garbage. So they did a merger with previous one, combining the idea with decent app, and continued until competition crumpled. And now they’re screwing both drivers and customers hard, but there’s now no alternative.
The only good thing that came out of it is incentive structure and a punishment for drivers for not taking orders. It made it so that as a customer you can safely order without fear that you’d have to wait for hours to find a car - your hot potato order can’t be passed off forever, and somebody has to pick it up eventually, even if it’s a bad driver who majorly fucked up recently and now has to take it for redemption, or otherwise lose his job.
Airbnb never made financial sense to me. Because every time I looked there, I found the same, and much better options, for as much as half price on local ad boards. Seems to be just a convinience factor, as renters just put their properties at 2x there for an off-chance a rich tourist checks in.
AI to me seems like a dead end. The innovations are cool and flashy, but they inevitably fall short of being reliable enough to be useful. Like, I don’t use chatgpt anyhow because there’s always a chance it’ll spit out plausible bullshit which makes it so that every answer must be double-checked. And if you can find the source to check against, then why even ask the bot in the first place? Same for art, it can get you maybe halfway there, but refining the prompt takes skill and time that’d be better spend learning to edit and make real art instead.
But for cryptocurrencies I should’ve bought in way sooner. Even if they didn’t hit ATH’s every few years. I find that even drug dealers and crooks are more trustworthy than my own government, who is actively malicious, and has hurt my financial wellbeing harder and more often than even the crypto rug pulls. And that’s coming from someone who got hit by luna, ftx, and even mtgox, among others. Still better than the government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore. Yes, the ecological impact sucks, but it’s not a crypto problem specifically. I don’t see how mining is worse than, than, say, a literal mining operation across the road that uses electrical heating because they’re too poor to fix their windows and put proper insulation, and running heaters just makes financial sense? There must be regulations to make dirty power more expensive, which will make the problem solve itself. And if we have green energy, who cares what one’s using it for? Mine, game, hang christmas lights, whatever, who gives a shit
government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore
What are you referencing here?
I feel like I should be recognizing some specific thing here, but I can’t figure it out.
Well it’s third world problems, but the specific event I had in mind was when Russia froze all it’s citizen’s foreign assets in 2022 in an attempt to save it’s own currency from plummeting. This left a lot of people stranded, myself included. I did eventually get mine out, but the law, as far as I know, is still in place, so I tend to think it was purely by luck and some mistake on the bank’s side. Others didn’t have it that lucky, I’ve heard of people being fined as much as $400 for just trying. But, it’s just one case, I believe there’s lots of other places where you just can’t trust the government with money - African, South American, Central Asian countries first come to mind. Even Canada had a scandal where they froze COVID protesters assets - I don’t support the cause, but I don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets either.
Sure, offshore accounts and physical assets can work in those cases too, but it can be challenging to get a hold of them as an ordinary citizen. Crypto circumvents that by being uncontrollable by design and widespread enough that I can exchange it in some back alley in one place and then again in another with less risk and overhead than any other way.
Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I’m looking at it from that lens.
don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets
Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden’s accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don’t have a good answer to it.
third world Russia
Technically, Russia would be second world :)
I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem – either there’s a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you’re in “You have to know a guy who knows a guy” territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can’t pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.
Illegal delivery services are my fav ones. People are physically running or riding like slaves to get you tendies from a KFC across the street. No, you are probably not a person who needs that due to some health conditions, you are privileged to buy their labor cheap and further their abuse.
My favorite part about those specifically is the “ghost kitchens” that operate 6 different restaurants out of the same building with the exact same dozen menu items under 6 different names in 6 different sets of packaging
Well yeah but… Fake money, is “real” money real? The support structures behind bitcoin and dollars or euros are different and both have positive and negative aspects. All in all bitcoin is worse, mainly for the power usage, but if it comes to ease and speed of transfer for the average user bitcoin rules. I guess we can mostly thank banks for that.
This raises the question of how much pollution is created by the dollar in the form of increased consumption from shortened time preferences. The dollar inflates to encourage people to spend more now instead of save, so that the economy gets bigger.
Man it’s so brutal when you think about it like that. Inflation is theft by the back door.
The feds job is to force people to stay productive. It’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s not how it works. When you invest into the stock market, it actually beats inflation in the long run. So inflation doesn’t actually make me spend any more money than I would otherwise, since investing it would still later improve my buying power even more
You mean that investing in the stock market is a hedge against inflation? I can’t argue with that. But not everyone has money to invest in the stock market after rent, bills, food etc. Unless your wages/benefits rise in line with inflation or you have money to spare, you basically only have the option of buying worse stuff or simply going without it.
Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.
Well, one is about to take your job while the others will just make your life slightly easier.
